September 10th

Going to be a short one tonight, for some reason I can't pick up the internet on my laptop at the Ronald McDonald House, so I am on one of their computers, but would much rather be in bed right now...

So I just wanted to reiterate my posts on facebook today in case some of you didn't see them. This afternoon around 2:00 they went ahead with the surgery to take Elijah off of the ECMO, so they took the tube out of his neck and closed that hole and got the huge machine out of the room so he already looks better! The surgery was successful, they were a little concerned afterwards because he was putting out too much CO2 and they wanted to get that down, but it got better as the night went on. His oxygen levels remained great, so that was a huge deal!

So now he is on a bigger ventilator and they are going to work on weaning him off of that slowly and then they will place him on a smaller ventilator and wean that until he is breathing all on his own again. He will remain in an induced coma the entire time he's on the ventilator just because we know he will want to rip everything off of his face and out of his body as soon as he gets the chance... So the time period right now is looking like at least one week and I assume even after they get him off the ventilators it will still take some time to really make a full recovery.

They still do not know what caused this and that is the big question mark right now. We really need them to find out what it is so they can be sure that they are treating it correctly and making sure it is totally gone before they send us away. Also, so we will able to prevent this from happening again. They are still waiting on test results back, including a test for H1N1 which they weren't concerned about in the beginning, but they seem to be leaning towards lately, so we will see. No one we know has been infected at all so it will be quite a surprise if that is the case.

We've had lots of visitors and it has been wonderful. Our church sent out an email yesterday inviting everyone to come pray for us and we had quite a large group of people come by tonight and lay their hands on us and pray and it was so amazing. We are continually impressed every day by the love that has been shown to us and to Elijah. We cannot thank you enough. Please keep the prayers coming and the encouragement as well, it is such a blessing to us. Thank you!